Prelude to Pearl Harbor: The United States Navy and the Far East, 1921-1931 by Gerald E. Wheeler

Author:Gerald E. Wheeler [Wheeler, Gerald E.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Eschenburg Press
Published: 2017-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

Because of the weakness in cruisers the Navy warned Congress in January, 1927, not to expect too much at Geneva, but congressmen, like many Americans, believed that America’s great potential for cruiser building would be as effective as ships in the water when it came to reaching an agreement.{276}

Underlying the failure of the whole conference and contributing materially to the inability the United States and Great Britain to agree was the problem of Japan. The majority of the accounts written concerning the Geneva Conference have consistently pointed up the clash between the British and American delegations, and these studies have generally agreed that Japan was the most cooperative of those present seeking naval limitation.{277} But a more careful study of the evidence indicates that the Japanese Navy and the ubiquitous pressure of the Japanese Empire in the Far East on British and American planning were the shoals upon which the conference grounded.

The preconference study for the American position at Geneva had developed certain points upon which there could be little or no bargaining. Because the American representation consisted principally of naval officers, there was little likelihood or reason for it to depart from the studied judgments of the General Board. As a co-delegate, Ambassador Hugh Gibson was in general agreement with Rear Admiral Jones; both construed their instructions to mean that the United States sought a technical treaty designed to limit those vessels not covered by the Washington Five-Power Treaty, There was no particular need, as they saw it, for political clauses in the finished protocol, and the American group was not chosen to accomplish such an end.{278}

By 1927 the General Board had decided that the 10,000-ton cruiser armed with 8-inch guns best suited America’s needs. The weight of the cruiser was necessary to allow machinery for speed, the mounting of 8-inch-gun turrets, armor, and the fuel capacity to operate independently or with the Battle Fleet in the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean. At the conference the delegates never went on record to state which of these characteristics was most important hut privately they agreed it was the 8-inch gun. A naval adviser in the delegation and director of the War Plans Division, Rear Admiral Frank H. Schofield, summed up the Navy’s position in his diary:

“To build cruisers of less gunpower [less than 8 inches] for our purposes would be highly ineffective, as at the point of tactical contact such cruisers might be outclassed (out-gunned) by the 8-inch cruisers of other powers. Our lines of communication in the Pacific are so long and necessity for protecting them so urgent that we could not afford to depend upon protection of those lines with a 6-inch gun cruiser or with two or three small cruisers, when the convoy they were protecting might be attacked by 8-inch gun cruisers. So long as the 8-inch gun cruiser exists, it is to our interest and practically our necessity to limit construction of cruisers to vessels of this class.”{279}

When the American delegation assented to dividing

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